Broadly Aristocles?

Every age inherits the past twice. First, through the testimony left behind by those who stood nearest to it. Second, through the habits of interpretation cultivated by later generations, each persuaded that it has devised a more reliable method of listening than any predecessor. Between these inheritances lies a quiet rivalry. Ancient voices speak with familiarity, modern historians with at times over-zealous discipline. The temptation arises to imagine chronology itself as a ladder of knowledge, each century lifting us farther above the uncertainties that clouded earlier observers. Such confidence carries its own mythology. It encourages the belief that distance clarifies, that skepticism refines, that every ancient tradition arrives before the modern scholar already burdened with suspicion.

The question of Plato's birth name illustrates this disposition with unusual clarity. Ancient biographical tradition consistently records that the philosopher received the name Aristocles at birth and later acquired the appellation Plato, whether because of his broad shoulders, expansive forehead, or capacious style. Robin Waterfield, in Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy, urges readers toward a different conclusion. The nickname, he argues, appears so early and so universally that it may simply have been the philosopher's actual given name, while the story of Aristocles belongs among the familiar embellishments that accumulated around celebrated figures. The argument possesses a certain elegance. Simplicity often does. Yet elegance and historical probability occupy different provinces of judgment.

The case for Aristocles rests upon a principle older than philology itself. Testimony acquires significance through convergence. One witness may err, another may embroider, a third may confuse inherited anecdotes with remembered fact. Independent traditions repeating the same claim over centuries deserve another kind of hearing. Ancient writers repeatedly identify Plato's birth name as Aristocles. They disagree regarding details of the nickname's origin, which itself suggests the ordinary proliferation of explanatory folklore around a stable fact. The point of agreement concerns the birth name. Variation gathers around the explanation of "Plato," while consistency surrounds "Aristocles." Such asymmetry rarely arises through pure invention.

A. Notopoulos recognized precisely this feature in his celebrated 1939 article, "The Name of Plato." His discussion remains instructive because it avoids the theatrical certainty that often accompanies debates over antiquity. Instead, he examines the transmission of the evidence itself. The tradition concerning Aristocles appears neither isolated nor accidental. It enters antiquity through multiple channels, surviving across authors separated by centuries and intellectual milieus. One need not imagine perfect historical memory to appreciate the force of such continuity. Cultural memory often preserves elementary biographical facts with remarkable tenacity, particularly when attached to figures whose lives became objects of sustained educational interest.

Waterfield invites readers to suspect precisely this continuity. Universal acceptance of the name Plato, he proposes, may indicate that the supposed birth name emerged through retrospective rationalization. Since everyone knew the philosopher as Plato, later biographers sought an explanation. Aristocles fulfilled that narrative need. The hypothesis certainly possesses internal coherence. Every historian recognizes examples of explanatory legends crystallizing around famous names. Alexander, Pythagoras, Homer, and countless others attracted stories whose symbolic resonance exceeded their factual foundation.

Historical explanation, however, cannot subsist upon abstract possibility. One may always imagine an origin story for a tradition. The decisive question concerns comparative probability. Why Aristocles? Why this specific name rather than another? Why does the tradition settle upon an entirely plausible aristocratic Athenian name instead of something transparently symbolic? One encounters no hidden etymological joke, no allegorical flourish, no moral lesson disguised as biography. Aristocles appears with the quiet ordinariness characteristic of genuine civic nomenclature.

Indeed, the very plainness of the name deserves attention. Legends typically gravitate toward significance. They seek memorable details, providential signs, dramatic reversals. Aristocles lacks theatrical appeal. It neither illuminates Plato's philosophy nor anticipates his intellectual destiny. Its function remains stubbornly administrative, the sort of information family genealogies preserve because someone once possessed reason to record it. Fiction generally hungers for brighter colors.

One sometimes detects beneath modern skepticism a peculiar asymmetry in standards of evidence. Ancient testimony enters the courtroom already under indictment. Silence counts against it. Agreement counts against it. Variety counts against it. Consensus invites suspicion because unanimity appears too convenient, while disagreement reveals unreliability because inconsistency appears equally suspect. Every path leads toward doubt. Such reasoning gradually immunizes itself against confirmation.

The broader historiographical question therefore extends beyond Plato himself. Why exactly do we assume that the ancients understood their own intellectual inheritance less adequately than twenty first century scholars? Methodological sophistication undoubtedly offers genuine advantages. Epigraphy, papyrology, archaeology, textual criticism, and digital reconstruction have transformed classical scholarship. No serious observer wishes to exchange these achievements for the speculative antiquarianism of earlier centuries. Yet advances in method do not erase the epistemic privileges enjoyed by proximity. Ancient writers inhabited networks of transmission now irretrievably lost. Libraries vanished. Family traditions disappeared. Civic archives dissolved. Oral recollections evaporated. Every generation since antiquity has worked with a diminished archive.

R. G. Collingwood repeatedly insisted that historical knowledge depends upon recovering the questions earlier generations sought to answer. Gadamer similarly argued that understanding emerges through dialogue across historical horizons rather than conquest of one horizon by another. Their reflections illuminate the present controversy. Ancient biographers possessed assumptions different from ours, certainly, yet those assumptions existed alongside access to materials forever absent from modern scholarship. Historical criticism flourishes through humility toward vanished evidence.

The confidence with which modern scholars occasionally dismiss ancient testimony recalls Nietzsche's observation that every age invents flattering genealogies for its own virtues. Ours celebrates criticism. Earlier centuries celebrated memory. Neither virtue alone suffices. Civilization depends upon their conversation.

Debra Nails approaches Plato from another direction altogether. The People of Plato reconstructs the intricate social networks surrounding Socrates and his circle with extraordinary precision. Her work reminds readers that names within classical Athens carried familial, political, and genealogical significance extending well beyond individual identity. Aristocratic households treasured continuity of names across generations. Aristocles harmonizes comfortably with this broader social landscape. Plato, by contrast, enters that landscape as an unusual designation whose explanatory burden naturally invites inquiry.

One occasionally hears another objection. Since Plato himself never mentions the name Aristocles, skepticism supposedly acquires additional support. Yet autobiography scarcely governed classical philosophical writing. Plato's dialogues maintain a remarkable reserve concerning their author's private existence. Socrates dominates the stage while Plato withdraws behind the dramatic curtain with almost mischievous discipline. The silence extends across countless personal details. His father's appearance, his mother's habits, the cadence of his household, childhood memories, ordinary friendships, all recede into shadow. Expecting explicit confirmation regarding his birth name imposes expectations foreign to the literary architecture of the dialogues themselves.

Literary anonymity possesses its own dignity. Every attentive reader eventually notices how Plato arranges scenes with extraordinary visual delicacy while remaining personally invisible. The effect resembles those films in which the camera glides through rooms touched by human presence although the director never appears. One feels the intelligence orchestrating every movement without ever mistaking it for another character upon the screen. Such artistic reserve hardly encourages autobiographical disclosure.

Waterfield's skepticism derives considerable force from a commendable instinct. Historians should distrust anecdotes that explain greatness through picturesque details. Ancient biography delighted in moral symbolism. Broad shoulders become metaphors for broad intellects. Physical traits mirror philosophical virtues. The genre frequently substitutes literary satisfaction for factual certainty. Yet skepticism achieves its highest value when carefully discriminating among traditions rather than flattening them into uniform unreliability.

The stories explaining the nickname Plato certainly display legendary embellishment. Their variety almost guarantees it. One source favors wrestling. Another praises physique. A third celebrates rhetorical amplitude. Such explanations resemble flowers arranged around a monument whose foundation predates the decoration. The nickname invited interpretation precisely because it required one. Aristocles did not.

Montaigne once observed that memory often preserves trifles with greater fidelity than grand events because trifles escape the vanity that encourages embellishment. A birth name qualifies as exactly such a trifle. It bears administrative significance, familial continuity, and little dramatic glamour. Historians frequently underestimate the resilience of ordinary facts.

One might imagine a modest Athenian household introducing a child as Aristocles long before philosophy transformed that child into the intellectual sovereign of the Academy. The centuries then gather around him, adding stories, comparisons, miracles of interpretation, affectionate exaggerations, scholarly disputes. Somewhere amid that accumulation remains the domestic name carried through childhood before history preferred another. The image possesses emotional appeal, certainly, yet its appeal arises from historical plausibility rather than romantic fantasy. Every famous individual once answered to a name spoken casually across breakfast tables and courtyards before posterity polished it into marble.

The temptation to reject Aristocles ultimately reveals less about Plato than about ourselves. Modern scholarship rightly distrusts certainty purchased cheaply. Yet suspicion may itself become inexpensive. One gradually acquires the habit of treating every inherited tradition as a problem requiring demolition instead of explanation. The result resembles a collector so fascinated by identifying forgeries that authentic paintings begin to appear suspicious simply because they survived.

History deserves greater patience. Ancient testimony deserves greater courtesy. Neither deserves blind faith. Both deserve sustained attention before dismissal. The tradition identifying Plato's birth name as Aristocles survives precisely because generation after generation found no compelling reason to replace it with another account. Such continuity never constitutes mathematical proof. Historical inquiry rarely grants such luxuries. It does, however, create a cumulative presumption whose weight modern skepticism has yet to overcome.

Perhaps the deepest irony rests here. The philosopher whose works repeatedly explore the difference between appearance and reality has himself become captive to an appearance of historical method. Distance masquerades as superiority. Skepticism acquires the prestige of progress. The archive, meanwhile, continues its quiet testimony. Across centuries of commentary, copyists, teachers, lexicographers, and biographers, one simple name persists with remarkable composure. Aristocles. A modest name. An ordinary Athenian inheritance. A memory carried forward through antiquity with greater steadiness than many modern readers appear willing to concede.

Nietzsche's Venice

 

                                        Edward Munch, Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, c.1906 

The terminal collapse of Friedrich Nietzsche in Turin stands among the most arresting episodes in modern intellectual history. Few philosophers have left behind so extensive a record of their own psychological dissolution, and fewer still entered a condition in which philosophical vision, neurological pathology, religious ecstasy, and personal identity became so thoroughly entangled that any stable boundary between them began to disappear. When Franz Overbeck arrived in Turin during the opening days of January 1889 to retrieve his friend, Nietzsche's career as a creative thinker had already reached its conclusion. The philosopher who had devoted decades to dismantling Christianity, conventional morality, nationalism, and the pretensions of academic philosophy now inhabited an increasingly delusional world. He declared himself Dionysus, identified himself with the Crucified Christ, signed his correspondence as Caesar, and proclaimed the inauguration of a new historical epoch over which he alone exercised dominion. Remarkably, the external architecture of his prose remained largely intact. Grammar, cadence, and punctuation retained their customary precision, even as the meanings they sustained drifted ever further toward exaltation and psychosis.

Overbeck later recounted the encounter in letters addressed to Peter Gast. His recollections preserve a deeply unsettling paradox. Nietzsche greeted him with extravagant warmth, repeatedly embracing and kissing him while speaking in compressed prophetic utterances that oscillated between tenderness, ecstatic certainty, and theatrical grandeur. Sustained conversation had become almost impossible because he no longer participated in ordinary social exchange. Instead, he pronounced. At unpredictable moments he crossed the room to the piano, improvising with feverish intensity before resuming his oracular monologues. Overbeck recognized that his friend's speech still possessed the force of unwavering conviction while relinquishing nearly all communicative purpose. These utterances resembled revelation more readily than conversation. The intellectual discipline that had governed Nietzsche's writing for more than two decades had yielded to an uninterrupted enactment of visionary identity.

The catastrophe had announced itself long before January 1889. Throughout the preceding year Nietzsche composed with astonishing fertility. Within the span of a single year he completed The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and The Dionysian Dithyrambs. Much of this work displays exceptional lucidity, wit, and formal assurance. Yet his correspondence increasingly revealed signs of psychological instability. Friends remarked upon abrupt alterations in temperament. Publishers received increasingly extravagant demands. Letters expanded into proclamations of cosmic consequence. Nietzsche claimed to have condemned the German emperor, reordered European politics, and redirected the destiny of civilization itself. He addressed his correspondents as though his divine identity already required no explanation.

These final months unfolded against the backdrop of chronic illness that had shaped almost every stage of Nietzsche's adult life. His physical suffering long preceded his mental collapse. During childhood and early adulthood he endured severe migraines that frequently persisted for days and were often accompanied by visual disturbances characteristic of migraine aura. He also suffered recurrent gastrointestinal illness, episodes of dysentery, persistent nausea, vomiting, digestive pain, and profound exhaustion. His eyesight deteriorated steadily throughout adulthood until even ordinary reading became an ordeal. Increasing sensitivity to light compelled him to shield his eyes while writing or to dictate passages that he could no longer comfortably read. Persistent insomnia compounded these afflictions. His surviving correspondence returns again and again to pain, weakness, and the exhausting effort demanded by even the most ordinary tasks.

These afflictions profoundly determined the pattern of his working life. In 1879, at only thirty-four years of age, Nietzsche resigned his professorship at Basel because his health no longer permitted him to teach. During the remaining decade of intellectual clarity he adopted the existence of an itinerant writer, moving among Switzerland, Italy, France, and the Mediterranean in continual search of climates capable of moderating his symptoms. His days acquired an almost monastic regularity, structured around long walks, brief intervals of concentrated composition, carefully regulated meals, and extended periods of recuperation. Many of his books emerged through brief episodes of remarkable productivity interrupted by physical collapse. Even the compressed architecture of his aphorisms may owe something to these recurrent interruptions, each fragment bearing the imprint of a life repeatedly broken by illness.

Like many sufferers from chronic pain and insomnia during the nineteenth century, Nietzsche relied upon medications whose long-term neurological consequences remained largely unknown. Among the most prominent was chloral hydrate, then widely prescribed as a sedative. He employed it to relieve sleeplessness and persistent pain. Contemporary medicine recognizes that prolonged or excessive consumption may produce hallucinations, cognitive disturbance, delirium, physiological dependence, and convulsive episodes. Historians remain appropriately circumspect about assigning chloral hydrate a decisive role in Nietzsche's collapse. Nevertheless, it formed part of the intricate physiological milieu within which his final illness unfolded.

By the closing months of 1888 Nietzsche occupied modest rented rooms near Turin's Piazza Carlo Alberto. His daily existence had become increasingly solitary. He spent hours walking through the city, composing manuscripts, attending concerts, and preserving a disciplined routine despite mounting psychological instability. Later visitors remarked upon the striking contrast between the meticulous order of his apartment and the increasingly extravagant character of his correspondence. His handwriting retained its elegance. His prose preserved its extraordinary compression and musical cadence. The personality emerging from those pages drifted ever farther from the shared world inhabited by his readers.

The decisive rupture came on 3 January 1889. According to the familiar account preserved by later witnesses, Nietzsche encountered a cab driver beating an exhausted horse in a public square. Overcome with distress, he rushed toward the animal, threw his arms around its neck, embraced it, and collapsed. Historians continue to dispute the precise details because contemporary reports diverge in significant respects. Yet every surviving account converges upon the same conclusion. Something irrevocable occurred in Turin that day. Nietzsche was escorted back to his lodgings, where his behavior became progressively more erratic. He alternated between singing, shouting, weeping, laughter, dancing, and prolonged sessions at the piano. Eventually his landlady summoned assistance, and telegrams reached Basel requesting that Overbeck come without delay.

Several days later Overbeck encountered a man transformed almost beyond recognition. Nietzsche welcomed him with extravagant affection before immediately launching into ecstatic monologues. He assumed theatrical poses, proclaimed divine revelations, and repeatedly returned to the piano, where he improvised with manic intensity. Overbeck later recalled the extraordinary conjunction of brilliance and disintegration. Certain gestures remained unmistakably Nietzsche's. His expressive vitality appeared inexhaustible. Yet reciprocal conversation had almost entirely vanished. The cognitive structures that ordinarily sustained memory, judgement, and ordinary social intercourse were rapidly giving way.

Medical examination soon established that Nietzsche had suffered a devastating neurological event, although nineteenth century medicine possessed only rudimentary means of determining its cause. He was transferred first to the psychiatric clinic in Basel and later to the asylum at Jena under the supervision of Otto Binswanger. During the early months his condition fluctuated unpredictably. Episodes of agitation alternated with intervals of confusion and comparative calm before yielding to a more persistent neurological decline. Speech gradually diminished. Intellectual faculties deteriorated. Paralysis slowly advanced. Throughout the final decade of his life he depended entirely upon the care of others, first his mother, Franziska, and later, following her death, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. He never resumed sustained philosophical work. In August 1900 he died after years of profound disability, most likely from complications arising from a series of strokes associated with cerebrovascular disease.

The journey from Turin to Basel occupies a singular place within the history of Nietzsche's final days because it preserves one last sustained glimpse of an intellect already passing beyond recovery. Overbeck understood that ordinary persuasion would prove ineffective. Rather than confronting Nietzsche's delusions directly, he fabricated a story that a festival was being held in his honor and that his presence was eagerly awaited. The ruse succeeded. Nietzsche accepted the invitation without hesitation and agreed to travel north.

Their train climbed through the Alps in an ordinary third class railway carriage. Fellow passengers included a dentist, a peasant woman, and Walter Malraux, each absorbed in the familiar rhythms of travel while an immense private catastrophe unfolded only a few feet away. The juxtaposition lends the episode much of its emotional power. Railway timetables were observed, tickets inspected, luggage arranged, conversations exchanged. To everyone except Overbeck, Nietzsche appeared merely another eccentric traveler making his way across Europe.

As the train entered the St. Gotthard tunnel, darkness enveloped the carriage for more than half an hour. Steam locomotives transformed the confined passage into a chamber of reverberating iron and smoke. The thunder of the engine rolled continuously through the mountain while the rhythmic concussion of wheels against rails dissolved ordinary conversation into fragments. Passengers settled into silence. Somewhere within the carriage, a hen confined to a wicker basket pecked methodically throughout the crossing, its small persistent movements supplying an almost surreal counterpoint to the immense mechanical tumult surrounding it.

Within that darkness Nietzsche began to recite his poem Venice entirely from memory. He continued without hesitation, sustaining the poem from beginning to end while the train pressed through the mountain. Overbeck later recalled the scene with remarkable precision. Although neurological catastrophe had already overtaken its author, the poem emerged intact. Meter remained secure. Rhythm retained its equilibrium. Verbal sequence unfolded without apparent interruption. Long after judgment had begun to fragment, deeply consolidated memory continued to preserve one of the most delicate products of Nietzsche's imagination.

Few scenes better crystallize the pathos of Nietzsche's final years. A philosopher whose writings repeatedly returned to music, rhythm, recurrence, and memory now found himself enclosed within literal darkness, speaking verses that survived within him after much else had already begun to dissolve. The circumstances transformed the poem itself. Venice ceased to exist primarily as a literary composition awaiting revision. It had become part of the architecture of memory, preserved less as an object of authorship than as one of the enduring structures through which consciousness continued to organize itself.

Overbeck later confessed that, during those harrowing days, the thought of a mercy killing briefly entered his mind. Few observations communicate the extremity of Nietzsche's condition with equal force. Clinical descriptions enumerate symptoms. This private admission reveals the emotional reality confronting those who remained closest to him. His friends recognized that the man they had known was receding beyond any prospect of return. The years that followed consisted largely of institutional confinement, progressive neurological deterioration, increasing physical dependence, and an ever lengthening silence.

The medical interpretation of Nietzsche's collapse has remained the subject of sustained controversy for more than a century. Throughout his lifetime and for decades thereafter, physicians generally accepted tertiary syphilis, specifically neurosyphilis producing general paresis of the insane, as the most plausible diagnosis. The conclusion accorded comfortably with nineteenth century psychiatric practice, the observed pattern of progressive dementia, and the widespread prevalence of syphilitic neurological disease among middle aged adults. Once established, the diagnosis became so deeply embedded within Nietzsche's biographies that it acquired the authority of historical orthodoxy.

Recent scholarship has reopened the question. Deborah Hayden's Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis assembles the historical evidence supporting neurosyphilis with considerable care while acknowledging the substantial uncertainties that remain. Hayden draws attention to reports produced by physicians who examined Nietzsche after he had entered a largely catatonic condition. Among their observations was a scar on his penis interpreted as compatible with a healed chancre, the characteristic lesion of primary syphilis. She further reconstructs the long chronology of chronic illness, progressive neurological impairment, and eventual dementia within a clinical framework that many physicians of the late nineteenth century would readily have recognized as advanced syphilitic disease. Her study restores corporeality to the center of Nietzsche's story, reminding readers that his philosophy emerged alongside decades of relentless physical suffering.

Other neurologists and historians remain unconvinced. Several recent studies argue that frontotemporal dementia furnishes a more persuasive explanation of Nietzsche's symptoms. The disorder commonly produces profound alterations of personality, behavioral disinhibition, grandiosity, compulsive conduct, relative preservation of language during its early stages, and eventual cognitive collapse. Other investigators have proposed vascular dementia, inherited disorders such as CADASIL, mitochondrial disease, or complex interactions between cerebrovascular pathology and chronic migraine. No hypothesis has secured universal acceptance because the surviving evidence remains insufficient to settle the question conclusively. The debate continues, sustained by competing interpretations of an irretrievably incomplete medical record.

Psychological interpretations have circulated alongside medical hypotheses since Nietzsche's death. Some commentators have proposed that the extraordinary intensity of his philosophical project hastened his mental collapse, treating the relentless demands of self-examination as an etiological force in their own right. Others dismiss such arguments as a vestige of Romantic mythology that mistakes intellectual audacity for clinical explanation. Most contemporary scholarship adopts a more measured position. Nietzsche's collapse is generally understood as the manifestation of biological disease unfolding within a life already marked by chronic pain, physical debility, intellectual solitude, sustained overwork, and persistent psychological strain. Philosophy furnished the symbolic vocabulary through which he interpreted his experience. Disease altered the cerebral architecture from which those interpretations emerged. Each belonged to the same continuous biography.

Hayden also directs attention to Carl Jung's seminars on Thus Spoke Zarathustra. During those lectures Jung repeated testimony attributed to unnamed individuals who claimed to have known Nietzsche personally and alleged that, during his years of wandering, he had visited two homosexual brothers. The anecdote has never been corroborated by independent evidence and remains historically unverifiable. Its persistence nevertheless reveals the remarkable energy with which successive generations have searched Nietzsche's intimate life for clues capable of resolving the mystery of his illness. Questions of sexuality, contagion, identity, and pathology gradually became interwoven with attempts to interpret both his philosophical writings and his mental disintegration. The history of Nietzsche's body acquired an interpretative authority almost equal to the history of his ideas.

Taken together, these materials disclose a prolonged process of neurological and physical deterioration that entered public view only during the first days of January 1889. The spectacle witnessed in Turin possessed its dramatic force because it unfolded before astonished observers in a public square. Its antecedents, however, extended across decades of recurrent illness, migraine, digestive disease, visual impairment, insomnia, chronic pain, solitude, and whatever underlying neurological disorder ultimately extinguished one of the nineteenth century's most singular intellects. The collapse itself marked a culmination rather than an inception.

Within this longer trajectory, the recitation of Venice occupies a place unlike any other episode in Nietzsche's final years. The poem had never assumed its definitive published form. It survived instead as an internal possession, preserved within memory rather than upon the printed page. At the very moment when judgment, identity, and coherent language were beginning to fragment, the poem endured with extraordinary fidelity. Rhythm remained intact. Sequence remained intact. The architecture of verse proved more durable than many of the cognitive faculties that had first brought it into existence. Such moments illuminate the extraordinary resilience of deeply consolidated memory under conditions of profound neurological injury.

That resilience explains my own attraction to translating Venice. I regard the poem as the final extended literary performance preserved from a philosopher standing upon the threshold of irreversible neurological collapse. Certainly it possesses independent aesthetic distinction. Yet it also survives as something rarer: a document recording the persistence of memory under extreme physiological duress. Before reaching the printed page, these verses passed through darkness, confinement, illness, and the progressive dissolution of the mind that created them. Their survival belongs simultaneously to literary history, intellectual history, and the history of the human brain. 

Venice

An der Brücke stand

jüngst ich in brauner Nacht.

Fernher kam Gesang;

goldener Tropfen quoll's

über die zitternde Fläche weg.

Gondeln, Lichter, Musik -

trunken schwamm's in die Dämmrung hinaus ...

 

Meine Seele, ein Saitenspiel,

sang sich, unsichtbar berührt,

heimlich ein Gondellied dazu,

zitternd vor bunter Seligkeit.

- Hörte [ihr jemand] zu?

 

My English adaptation:

 

Venice

Upon this threshold I stand, lost in copper night. 
A song arrives afar, as liquid gold taken flight,
To spill its heavy drops across me and trembling sea. 
Here the gondolas and lights, in drunken revelry, 
Are drifting toward the dusk upon a rhythmic tide.  
And my soul, a secret lyre where phantom fingers glide, 
Breathes out a barcarolle, a song of silent bliss, 
To meet rolling water's pulse and hungry shadow's kiss. 

My spirit - kaleidoscopic fire - shivers in the air. 
Does any spirit hear my music dwelling there?